In recent years, rapid progress has been made in a technical development for realizing automatic driving of an automobile. For example, a lane departure warning system that emits warning when a cruising vehicle moves out of a lane has been developed recently as a technical development related to automatic driving. When, in a monotonous road, there is a decrease in the level of driver's awakening, and the cruising vehicle begins to move out of the lane, the lane departure warning system emits warning with vibration, sound, and the like. It is recognized that such lane departure warning system has the effect of preventing lane departure accident of vehicles in advance, and when the effect is considered in terms of statistics, it is recognized that the lane departure warning system greatly reduces the lane departure accident of a vehicle group having the lane departure warning system provided.
A technique for detecting obstacles with a submillimeter wave radar using a submillimeter wave, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) using laser instead of a submillimeter wave, or a stereo camera has been developed as a technique for sensing around a vehicle to measure a distance between and arrangement of the vehicle and a vehicle driving ahead (see PTL 1). Therefore, applications such as an adaptive cruise control system for maintaining the distance between the vehicle and a vehicle driving ahead and further an emergency collision reduction/prevention brake system have been put into practice as applications.
When automatic driving is used, the degree of proficiency in driving is different depending on the driver, and it is considered that it is very important to monitor the status of the driver.
However, a system in which a passenger does not at all intervene in driving of a vehicle from the departure location to the destination location is viable only in a closed environment such as a vehicle running on a track such as an electric train and a monorail, but in the system that can be conceived today, introduction of the automatic driving of vehicles has not been realized on a generally-used road surface for the time being.
On the other hand, introduction of automatic driving is beginning to start in some way. At that occasion, a manual intervention travelling section is expected to occur. At that occasion, when the vehicle once goes into an automatic driving mode and shuts off intervention into the driver's driving, a lower level of manual driving recovery ability at that occasion of recovery is considered to be a risk of causing an accident and disturbing traffic.
For example, unlike drink and driving, even if the driver gets a little bit fatigued, transportation on a vehicle is considered to cause a mental effect on a person who wishes to move to actively drive the vehicle, and it is desired to have a mechanical or systematic mechanism for reducing an operation involving danger as an automatic driving system.